Robots

I recently bought a copy of Asimov's collected robot stories, 'The Complete Robot'. I find that I have read all of them before but it's certainly eye-opening to reread them afresh, particularly that I'm now a cynical commercial programmer rather than an optimistic college student.

Asimov, like pretty much all early 'futurologists' and sci-fi writers really did not get computers right. This is nothing against Asimov - I love his work - but it applies generally. Take the original series of Star Trek: machines that could understand every nuance of human speech yet talked in stilted robotic syllables. In the real world it is easy for computers to speak - speech synthesis has been around for decades - but speech recognition is difficult, never mind the ability to make sense of what people intend, something we still are a long way from.

Asimov saw robots and computers as proto-humans. Robots would replace humans by being able to do everything that humans could do - read and write on paper, operate machinery by using human shaped hands, that sort of thing. What has really happened is that humans have adapted to the machines as we have always done with our tools, since the first wheel, the first spear.

Example: We want a machine to read in our mathematics and give us an answer. In Asimov's world (see the Escape short story for an example), the robot would be fed the data on paper, one sheet at a time. In some stories the results are written by the robots by using a pen on paper, much like a plotter.

What really happened? We adapted to the computers. We enter our data directly into them. The machines work on our data in their native languages, because that's what we use. We read the results directly from the computer also. When did you last print something out? I no longer have a printer. The Internet and the web are the greatest examples of this. We don't ask a robot to find us information, which it goes physically out into the world to find and fetch back to us in books and newspapers. We enter the data directly into computers and can call it up instantly, anywhere, and in infinite numbers of copies.

Roboticisation is the future. Asimov was somewhat pessimistic when he predicted people turning against machines. It does happen of course - factories are becoming totally automated and people do lose their jobs. But really people are losing jobs that they don't want to do. Most people are happier working in an office and using their mind than working in a factory where all they do is put the small boxes in the big boxes, twice a second, for eight or twelve hours a day.

I am happier with this also. I don't really want human hands to prepare the food I eat. I have worked in a food related factory - I know that workers don't care what they do with the products, that items dropped on floors are put back on conveyors and that a 16 year old just out of school with no qualifications is more likely not to wash his hands before handing goods than he is to have any sense of hygiene.

And finally I get to the point. I watched this video from the BBC; a tour of the Goodfella's pizza factory. I'm sure we only see the good stuff and everyone is on best behaviour for the cameras, but it looks clean, well run, incredibly productive and above all is packed with efficient, accurate and cool robots.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7733602.stm